Information about New SAT Concordance

Today on ACT’s website, ACT CEO Marten Roorda called into question the integrity of the new SAT concordance tables. It is vital to students and our members that we correct this misinformation.

Mr. Roorda falsely claims that the College Board derived our new concordance tables based on the March 2016 administrations of the new SAT. In fact, we conducted two large-scale national concordance studies in December 2014 and December 2015. This approach exceeds industry standards. We stand behind the methodology and the results of these studies, including the concordance tables and the SAT Score Converter app.

We conducted these concordance studies before the first administrations of the new SAT because we clearly heard from our members at colleges and universities across the country that they would need this information to make admissions decisions this year. Additionally, states and districts that have recently switched from administering the ACT to administering the SAT statewide need concordance information to maintain continuity of students’ historical data within their student information systems.

Mr. Roorda goes on to question the process we used to develop what is known as a derived concordance between the ACT and the new SAT (Mr. Roorda refers to this as a “chained concordance”). Several months ago, we reached out to ACT to express our strong interest in conducting a new SAT-ACT concordance study to update the existing decade-old study. In the interim, however, a derived concordance is a valid way to provide our members with the information they need. We want to assure our members that the derived concordance between the new SAT and the ACT is technically sound.

We look forward to working with ACT in a renewed spirit of cooperation.